WordPress Wins the Packt Awards

While WordPress occupied the top spot in the Overall Award, the other two extremely popular finalists MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position. After Pixie and Pligg sharing a similar result for the Most Promising CMS category, this is the second time the combined opinion of judges and the public was evenly divided for two CMSes, awarding each of them a first runner up spot.

I still think WordPress as a full-blown CMS is a stretch, and I say this as the practice director of a firm which has pushed WordPress about as far as it can go with all the stuff we’ve done for Federated Media. Just the other day, we started the conversation of what comes after we’ve maxed out WordPress’s capabilities, which we feel we’ve done.

My vote for WordPress was really a vote against the other two systems, which I didn’t care for, and a vote in favor of the community which has built up around WordPress. To be honest, if I could have just turned in two winners, I’d have done SilverStripe and MODx, and left it at that.

In saying this, I’m not trashing WordPress. I just define “CMS” differently, I guess.

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I suspect that this is more of a way for Packt to officially recognize the contributions that WordPress has made to content management in general: raising public awareness & filling-in the crucial need for an cheap, easy system that does relatively a lot out of the box.

@Joseph Scott: A plug-in?? No, sir. Try a new core with configurable content objects (not just a preconfigured page or post). Then throw in a way to display these objects in various views through templates. Then we’ll be in the same league as a Content Management System. And, if you’re going to bother, then add roles & permissions for each content object, too.

@Joseph Scott – I think WordPress has made some big strides in the past year or two. There maybe a plugin for this, but from the user (admin/editor/author/etc) experience, the ability to organize/display posts/pages in such a way that you don’t have to deal w/ pagination when that spans past 4 pages. Posts aren’t so bad, because you can filter them down by either author or category, but for pages, if there’s a lot of them, they’re no real good way to filter those. Again, there may be a plugin out there for it, but maybe a way to display the pages as an file explorer type view, or something similar could be helpful.

As far as development goes, we’ve really seen some “software personality” come out of WordPress when we’ve gotten up to the count 150,000(plus) posts with 70,000(plus) in the wp_terms table. We could probably go on and on about the results/test of various real-world applications & how changing a few things might (or might not) help, but for the sake of keeping my comment short’ish, I’ll bow out here & leave the real CMS expertise to those with more knowledge & wisdom then myself.

BTW – thanks for all the hard work you guys do over there (really trying not to suck up, but WordPress has helped cut a lot of our projects dev time down).

I’m surprised you didn’t score DotNetNuke higher. I found DotNetNuke’s mix of free open source and commercial culture rather confusing but I really liked it on the perspective of end-user usability.

Sometime later this week or early next week I plan to have my review posted and I’ll just say it puts us at odds with one another. Though in the end, I think we’ll agree that next year the only two CMS on this year’s list that has a shot next year for being declared “overall” winner is MODx and SilverStripe.

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